The more I learn about Donald Trump, the more I am amazed at how much support he seems to have. With behavior like his, I keep asking myself, why would anyone would consider voting for him.

So, why would they? Here are some possible reasons I can think of::

-Trump has usurped the GOP's candidacy and, no matter how distasteful he is, they will go along with the party will (party vote)

-They feel they could never vote for Clinton (anti-Clinton vote)

-Trump brings the perception of change in DC (vote for change)

-He is not a good choice but a better one than Clinton (lesser of two evils vote)

I'm sure there are others but these likely cover a large chunk of the electorate. The problem is not that any one of these voting strategies is better or worse than the other. The problem is they all exclude some of the most important criteria when evaluating someone for an important and powerful position: attributes of the candidate himself, not what groups he does or does not represent.

The above criteria are all based on identity. They justify a vote for Trump because:

-He (supposedly) represents the GOP-He is NOT Clinton-He is NOT a Washington DC insider-He is NOT Clinton

I'm not saying we shouldn't consider the above attributes. But I am suggesting we reduce their importance and bring other criteria into our decision making. In thinking about who should be president of our country, I'd want to answer some of these questions:

-What are his capabilities pertinent to the role?-What experience does he have that supports these capabilities?-What motivates him to run for office?-How does he make decisions?-What do I think about his ethical standards and his integrity? (And what is my basis for this judgement?)

No matter who our candidates are, I'd feel better if I thought most of us were considering them based on these questions (or others that help us understand the candidates as people and as leaders).

There may be a place for identity politics in our system. But it's probably not as important as we're making it.

Target makes a point of routinely moving their products around (making things hard to find if you're used to them being in a certain location) while training their cashiers to always ask "did you find everything okay?"

If I could invest in a word, I'd have bought stock in "transmogrify" in the 1960s

For some reason the word "transmogrify" has lept in usage over the past 50 years. Google Books Ngram Viewer (see screen clip below) shows its usage increased over 250% from 1960s to 2008. Yet in the first 150 years of its life (late 17th century to 1960s) it increased roughly 50%.

It's not exactly a common word, is it? So what's behind the growth in this fun, odd word?

I'm not a fan of seeing a person who could be President using such inflammatory and extreme comments regarding a serious situation like this. It's just my opinion but having a POTUS with a habit of making undisciplined statements like this could cause a lot of problems for our country.

From the article:

"Donald Trump has used the incident to discredit Clinton’s time at the helm of the state department. In a speech last week, he said Clinton 'spread death, destruction and terrorism everywhere she touched. Among the victims was our late ambassador Chris Stevens. I mean, what she did with him was absolutely horrible. He was left helpless to die as Hillary Clinton soundly slept in her bed.'"

"...but putting out a book of business advice that contains hundreds of pages of largely imaginary notions about human psychology is mainly helpful for book sales, not for the women who are snapping it up."

Looking at the Notes section in Sandberg's book, she includes 241 citations, many of which are from scientific and academic journals. Characterizing her book as being full of "imaginary notions about human psychology" seems a bit of a stretch.

If the author of this article is willing to stray so far from what's reasonable in this one sentence, it begs the question how credible is the rest of what she's written here. Reader beware.

Is it right for the #NYPD to edit #Wikipedia pages that contain references to the NYPD? It seems to contradict Wikipedia's strongly worded guidelines abut avoiding Conflict of Interest. On the other hand, if the NYPD edits are improving the accuracy of a page, then does that justify the conflict?

I'd be much more comfortable if the people doing these edits were up-front about it rather than making the changes as anonymous users. For me, that sends the wrong signal about the person's intent. And it's especially embarrassing to the organization when they get called out as in this article. The Internet is less anonymous than most people realize.﻿